You are right, my working assumption was that this was a method for overlapping visible light photos. While I know there are approaches to convert multiple photos from different angles into a 3D reconstruction, everything I've seen in that area either require photos from a LOTS of angles or produces 3D models that are so full of artifacts as to be useless. Having actual distance-to-surface measurements as lidar provides is a very different ballgame and certainly would have big implications.

The images are projected into 3D space to find overlaps, but from reading TFA, it sounds like the output is still a good old fashioned 2D photo, just one covering an awfully big area.

Holder, please investigate why is the NSA putting so many children at risk. But conducting extra-legal (and arguably extra-constitutional) collection of data for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with child abductions, they're driving the adoption default encryption across the US and across the world, making data unavaliable to police and emergency responders in critical situations. Won't the good folks at the NSA please think of the children?

That is a reasonable and nuanced position that clearly required you to think about the issue at hand... are you new here? (Clearly not given your UID but it's the traditional joke to make.)

You are right, the first state outside of New England to legalize gay marriage, which has also voted for a republican for president exactly once in the last three decades, is clearly on the right wing of politics in the USA.

It's not finding places for people to live, it is finding land to grow the food necessary to feed people in the style to which they have become/are becoming/will become accustomed to. Basic food prices have been spiking for the last several years, although it hasn't shown up in significant changes in the super market yet because most of the cost of processed food comes from the processing not the ingredients. (If the price of corn doubles it adds only 11 cents to the cost of a quarter pound hamburger: http://www.g-feed.com/2012/08/...) After years of stability, the rate at which virgin forest land is being converted to agricultural production has also started to increase again, likely because increases in crop productivity has slowed to a crawl in many of the most productive agricultural regions of the world: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2...

I see your foamhinge and raise you Nebraska's CarHenge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

And here I was looking forward to an argument about how large birds and delicious fuzzy brown fruit are NOT in fact closely related.

Fascinating analogy to research I was not previously familiar with. Would read comments by this AC in the future.

I wonder if they're comparing these grants to other grants by the same researcher in different years? If you're studying gene X which is known to function in biochemical process Y there are probably a limited number of good ways to word your explanation of that fact in the introduction to grant application after grant application.

Great to hear from someone so close to actual food production.

When it comes to rice is there really enough slack in the system to make a dent in the missing corn? My understanding is the amount of rice traded internationally is actually quite small (most is eaten in the same country it's grown in). I'm sure you/your tenants will get a great price for this year's crop, but realistically it seems the only place we'll be able to find slack in the US food system would be relaxing the ethanol mandate for one growing season (seems unlikely especially in an election year) or significantly reducing meat production. It's sounding like the second may already be happening, with many ranchers and feedlots thinning out their herds drastically this fall because the math shows they won't be able to afford to feed all their livestock at the prices corn is headed towards this winter.

In countries without a lot of meat consumption it's not clear what people will be able to do besides spend a lot more of their budgets on food or start missing a lot of meals.

I have to disagree with your characterization of the EU as a food exporter. In fact the EU is a major net food importer. Grain and soybeans to feed lifestock from Brazil and Argentina, fruit and vegetables from Africa. To the point where they're actually contributing to the problems with food insecurity in some parts of the world by exporting their opposition to various modern ag technologies to countries that depend on EU to buy their crops. Also, the US doesn't withhold exports to keep food prices high. We do other things that mean the price of US grown food is higher than it would be otherwise (like subsidizing ethanol and paying farmers not to farm certain acres through the CRP program.) but there aren't any barriers other than the higher prices preventing that food from being exported from the country. The ultimate effect is the same though, so I suppose it's one of one, half a dozen of another.

Actually XY individuals who develop into females as a result of a broken copy of a gene which encodes a testosterone receptor protein are overrepresented among the top female athletes of the world. A mixture of the developmental effects of zero testosterone signal during development (regular XX women have less than men but a lot more than zero) and the effect of the non-sex determining genes unique to the Y chromosome.